Third baseman Travis Shaw slugged the first two home runs of his major league career and had four RBIs as the Boston Red Sox overcame another shaky start from Joe Kelly in an 11-7 win over the Tampa...

Boston: The face of American resolve

The City of Boston cannot be brought to its knees by sword, cannon or bomb, or by the taste of them all, given to spread fear among a people who know it not.

History's pages are scattered here and there with fools who believed they could rattle sabers or unleash brutal men or kill random innocents and thus strike terror into the stout heart of New England's greatest city.

Some of their memories are tough to recall. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, Gen. Thomas Gage, King George III and a host of British petty tyrants, a serial killer, gangsters and mafiosi, and now a pathetic, passive murderer of children and women. The city outlived and outgrew them all before, as it always will.

Boston bow to the threats and blows of little men who harbor little boys' delusions of power and dominance? Boston? Never.

On Tuesday, President Obama said of this great nation, "the American people refuse to be terrorized." And the defiant face that expresses this refusal is the face of Boston.

Boston will never be terrorized. Its spirit disallows the possibility. Whether the world eventually comes to understand this truth, it is truth nonetheless. The people of Boston have proven it for almost four centuries. They will prove it for centuries more.